We’re building a world-class team to redefine knowledge work with AI

Zeno is a legal AI startup building a platform that helps lawyers research, review, and draft documents with real legal reasoning — not just text prediction. We’re developing technology that can:

• Search and retrieve statutes, case law, and commentary with high precision.

• Reason step-by-step, applying legal tests and weighing precedents.

• Explain every answer transparently, so lawyers can trace conclusions back to the exact sources.

Where most tools automate surface-level tasks, we’re focused on replicating the way lawyers actually think through legal problems, making depth and trust the foundation of everything we build.

You’re joining an early-stage startup that is already working with leading firms. Backed with €3M in seed funding, we’re now scaling a team of engineers and thinkers who want to solve real problems, drive innovation, and create lasting change in the legal sector.

About the role

As Head of Engineering, you will work directly with the CTO to build and scale an elite engineering organization capable of delivering AI-native, high-trust systems at international scale.

This is a leadership role for someone with deep technical authority. Your responsibility is to design the environment in which exceptional engineering happens: strong people, clear standards, disciplined execution, and scalable architecture.

You will translate technical vision into structured execution. That means building a world-class team, establishing an engineering operating system that enables speed without chaos, and ensuring our platform can support reliable, multi-region agentic workflows in a regulated domain.

You will partner closely with Product, Compliance, and infrastructure providers to align architecture with long-term product defensibility. As we move from startup to scale-up, you will evolve both systems and organization deliberately, raising the technical bar while maintaining momentum.

This role requires judgment, taste, and the ability to operate in ambiguity while making durable decisions.

What you’ll lead

A world-class engineering organization

• Hire and develop exceptional engineers, managers, and senior ICs.
  Set and enforce a high bar for technical quality, ownership, and performance.
  Build a culture of clarity, accountability, and high-agency execution.

The engineering operating system

• Design the processes that enable speed without chaos: planning, architecture reviews, incident response, and delivery discipline.
  Establish strong decision-making frameworks and clear ownership boundaries.

• Raise productivity through better structure.

Scalable, high-trust systems for agentic products

• Lead the technical direction for a multi-region, highly available platform powering agentic workflows.

• Pressure-test architecture against latency, reliability, cost, and observability constraints typical of retrieval- and data-intensive systems.

• Ensure compliance, security, and auditability are embedded into system design from day one.

Strategic alignment

• Act as the CTO’s closest partner in scaling engineering from startup to scale-up.

• Translate product and business goals into a coherent engineering strategy.

• Partner closely with Product, Compliance, and infrastructure providers to execute with precision.

Who you are

You’re a builder-led engineering leader: the kind of person teams rally around because you’ve done the hard part before: shipping real systems under pressure, making crisp trade-offs, and holding a ruthless quality bar without slowing momentum.

You may not write production code day-to-day, but you can still go toe-to-toe on architecture, reliability, and systems design with the strongest engineers in the room. This role needs technical authority.

• You’ve operated in high-agency environments where ambiguity is normal and outcomes matter more than process theater.

• You’re known for judgment and taste: you can spot fragile architecture, unclear ownership, and “we’ll fix it later” risk before it becomes existential.

• You can attract, assess, and retain top engineers, and you raise the bar with consistency.

You understand agentic systems because you’ve built around their failure modes

• You have experience building AI-native products, ideally including agentic systems: retrieval + tool use + orchestration + structured outputs + evaluation.

• You understand what makes agents hard in production: state, determinism vs. flexibility, guardrails, grounding, latency, cost, observability, and reliability when the model is uncertain.

• You can design org and architecture so experimentation is fast and failures are diagnosable.

You bring operational discipline for a high-trust product

• You’ve built or operated in environments where correctness, security, audit readiness, and governance are core constraints — not afterthoughts.

• You know how to embed compliance into engineering execution without killing speed.

You scale teams like you scale systems

• You build managers, set clear ownership, and create pathways for senior ICs.

• You introduce process only when it increases leverage.

• You communicate with clarity and force-multiply Product, Compliance, and Infrastructure partners.

Why this role

This is a strategic leadership role at a pivotal stage of Zeno’s growth. You will build and scale systems and teams that matter, ensuring long-term success as we expand our international footprint. If you thrive on leadership, process excellence, and high-impact engineering strategy, this role is for you.

The ride from startup to scale-up

Things will break, priorities will shift, and there won’t always be a playbook. You’ll wear multiple hats, ship fast, and learn faster. Some weeks will feel chaotic, some problems will feel bigger than your role. That’s the nature of the ride from startup to scale-up: if you need stability and structure, this won’t fit. But if you thrive on ownership, speed, and building from zero, you’ll love it here.

Why join us

• Be part of a product-driven team reinventing how legal professionals work.

• Join early and shape the foundation of a fast-growing, high-impact startup.

• Work in a place where hierarchy doesn’t matter, only the best ideas do.

• Collaborate with a top-tier team of engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs.

• Competitive compensation, employee benefits and strong upside as we grow.

• An inspiring place to work in the heart of Rotterdam.

Shape the future of legal work with us.